Redlaw - 01 (29 page)

Of course things didn’t go off without the odd hitch. Vampires at the Hounslow SRA took fright and resisted being herded towards the coaches. There were scuffles, gunfire, and casualties on both sides, before calm was eventually restored. At Stoke Newington, an over-the-fence breakout had to be curtailed by SHADE officers. At Kilburn, a nervous young private in the Royal Anglian Regiment got an itchy trigger finger and accidentally shot a Sunless with a Fraxinus round. The dusting caused what had up to that moment been an orderly procedure to dissolve into pandemonium.

On the whole, however, Operation Moonlight Flit could be deemed a success. Vampires were offloaded at Solarville One and filed through the entrance in a long queue. Once inside, they fanned out and started exploring the bounds of their new, permanent home.

While the transportations were getting under way, a movement of another kind took shape.

Throughout the day the committee of the People for the Ethical Treatment of the Sunless had been busy sending out mass emails and texts, as well using social networking sites, putting together a protest rally which would march on Parliament. The Solarville project was clearly prejudicial to Sunless, the equivalent of sweeping them under the carpet, and PETS wanted to make its outrage seen and heard.

Various vaguely likeminded groups got wind of the PETS plan and decided to throw their weight behind it. Anarchists, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists and both equal opportunities and animal welfare activists all came to the conclusion that the plight of vampires was an issue for them too, and invited themselves along on the march. PETS had been expecting perhaps a couple of hundred souls to turn up at the assembly point in Green Park, and so they did, resplendent in their blackest outerwear and purplest undergarments. However, an additional thousand gatecrashers also turned up, all toting placards declaring their opposition to heavy-handed government and planet-plundering multinationals, although a few of them had the courtesy to coin slogans that had at least a tangential relevance to the matter at hand:
Sunless Are An Oppressed Minority
,
Today Vampires—Tomorrow Jews/Blacks/Gays/Roma
,
Who Are The Real Bloodsuckers?
and so on.

Unfortunately, the Stokers also got wind of the rally and mounted a counter rally, a show of support for the Prime Minister’s decision to put more than just a fence between vamps and the human population. By spreading the word at pubs, clubs, transport cafés and building sites they managed to drum up a decent turnout of six hundred or so. That included a number of hangers-on who had no strong feelings either way about the Sunless situation but fancied the prospect of a bit of a scrap with some leftie, pro-vamp whingers. They gathered on the other side of the river at Jubilee Gardens, beneath the skeletal gaze of the London Eye.

The PETS protestors set off along the Mall to Trafalgar Square and southward from there down Whitehall. At the head of the procession, six of them carried a coffin, on the side of which was daubed the word SUNLESS RIGHTS in blood-drippy red paint.

At roughly the same time, the Stokers and their sympathisers started trooping down the South Bank and across Westminster Bridge in an unruly rabble. While the PETS ringleaders initiated call-and-response chants through megaphones, the Stokers bandied obscenities, sang football terrace songs and tossed empty lager cans into the gutter. The PETS people waved their placards and banners, the Stokers baseball bats and crowbars.

Both groups were converging on Parliament Square.

Shortly after 10pm, Nathaniel Lambourne got a call on his iPhone from Giles Slocock.

He let the call go to voicemail. He did the same with a second call, a minute later. With the third, he picked up and barked, “What the hell is this? What do you want? I’m in a meeting here.”

Which he was. In his study at home he was teleconferencing with the two other members of his Solarville consortium, in Boston, and in Tokyo. 10pm was the sweet-spot hour at which all three could communicate simultaneously without it being ridiculously early in the morning or ridiculously late at night for any of them.

“It won’t be on the news yet,” Slocock said. “I thought you should hear about it as soon as possible, from the horse’s mouth.”

“Hear about what?” snapped Lambourne. “Your speech sounds slurred. Have you been drinking, Giles?”

“No. Well, yes. A bit.”

“I expect your nose isn’t any too clean, either.”

“So frigging what? Listen, just listen...”

Lambourne made an apologetic gesture to the two screens in front of him. “Gentlemen, bear with me a moment. This is something I have to deal with. Shouldn’t take too long.”

The man in Boston with the blond blow-dried hair skewed his mouth impatiently, and the man in Tokyo gave a curt bow that was in its way no less indicative of irritation. Both were plutocrats in the same league as Lambourne, both breathing the same rarefied financial air. Each had more money than he could spend in several lifetimes and each took very personally anything that inconvenienced him or did not go precisely according to plan. That they were willing to let Lambourne call a hiatus to the meeting at all was testimony to the fact that he was one of the few people they regarded as an equal. From a lesser being, anyone outside their circle of a hundred or so peers, it would have been an unpardonable insult.

Lambourne took his iPhone onto the verandah outside the study, away from the webcam. The night air was cool, with threads of mist weaving across the lawn. Something rustled beneath the rhododendron bushes just across from the swimming pool, most likely a hedgehog rooting through the undergrowth for beetles and grubs. A fox barked distantly and forlornly in the woods.

“Make this quick,” he said to Slocock. “You’d better have a damn good—”

“Wax,” said Slocock. “Wax is dead.”

“Come again?”

“Maurice Wax. It’s all over Parliament. No one’s talking about anything else. He didn’t turn up for tonight’s session. Wasn’t answering the phone. Someone was sent round to his flat in Pimlico, one of his staff, some graduate intern, to find out what had become of him. Knocked. No reply. Couldn’t get in. The landlord had a master key...”

“Dead how? What happened? Wasn’t a sex game gone wrong, was it? Orange in mouth, belt round neck? Bloody stupid way to go.”

“Close. Hanged himself.”

“No.”

“Yes. Dressing-gown cord tied to a light fixture. Poor little intern, he’s completely freaked out by it. I just bought him the latest in a succession of stiff drinks. The way he described it to me—your neck stretches, did you know that? Under the weight of your body. To about three times its normal length. Like a piece of chewing gum when you pull it out from your mouth. And the smell. Wax had shat his pants. And his eyeballs—”

“Yes, yes, it wasn’t a pretty sight, I get the picture.”

“There was a note, too,” Slocock said. “Word processed, not a single typo. Typical Wax, neat and tidy to the end. It said—I can’t quote it exactly—but something about how he couldn’t be a party to the Solarville project any more. His conscience wouldn’t take it. As a Jew, as the grandson of people who’d only just managed to avoid getting sent to the death camps, he felt that putting Sunless into a bell jar was unacceptable. He definitely used that term, bell jar. He said it was a step too far. I think there was also some stuff about the relatives of his who did die, Treblinka, Auschwitz,
et cetera
, how he never knew them but felt a debt of obligation to them, felt he’d failed their memory, their legacy... Fuck. He topped himself, Nathaniel. Over this stupid Sunless business.”

“Why are you so upset? You can’t pretend you liked the man. You couldn’t stand him.”

“No, I didn’t like him. It’s just... Fuck. I feel like... I feel like
I
did this to him. I’m the one who pushed him over the edge. Me.”

“How? With the threat of blackmail?”

“It couldn’t have helped, could it? Added to the pressure he was under.”

“He gave his reasons for suicide quite clearly enough. He thought he was complicit in some kind of new Final Solution. That was what was preying on his mind, what drove him to hang himself, not the fear of being exposed as an S and M fetishist.”

“But the blackmail forced him into persuading the Prime Minister to go with the Solarville option. He wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t... if
you
hadn’t made me make him.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault too, is it?”

“I think you need to be prepared to take some of the blame.”

“I never believed I’d hear this sort of thing from you, Giles,” Lambourne said, lowering his voice but upping the anger a notch. “I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”

“A man is dead, Nathaniel. A man whose wife is on her way down from Newcastle right now to view his corpse. Whose two kids are going to wake up tomorrow fatherless.”

“Don’t be so fucking maudlin. My father died when I was eleven and I couldn’t have been gladder. I didn’t have to run around scared all the time of him belting me. Stumbling drunkenly at the top of the stairs and cracking his head open at the bottom was the biggest favour he ever did me and my mother.”

Lambourne had lived with this version of events for so long that he had almost convinced himself it was the truth. His father had been drunk at the time of his death, yes, but hadn’t stumbled down the stairs so much as been shoved, with all the strength that the arms of a bruised and terrified eleven-year-old boy could muster.

“I’ve hurt people before,” Slocock said. “I’ve screwed people over. Plenty of times. But I’ve never been responsible for someone’s death.”

“Well, get over it. Shit happens. If you want to get ahead in the world, this is the sort of thing you have to be ready to accept.”

“I’m not sure I can accept it.”

“You’re going to have to try. Otherwise you’re of no further use to me.”

“I don’t know if I want to be of any use to you any more.”

“That’s up to you,” said Lambourne. “No skin off my nose. You won’t be impossible to replace. You’re not the only MP I have on a leash. What you have to consider is what you stand to lose by bailing out. Me, I stand to lose nothing if you do, but you, with all your debts, your outgoings, you could have a very rocky road ahead. You’re relying on that position with Dep Chem to secure your future. Throw it away, by all means. Just don’t come running to me when your finances fall apart and the bailiffs start knocking at the door. It can happen far more quickly than you realise, you know.”

He could hear, from the breathing on the other end of the line, how Slocock was turning it all over in his mind. He could hear how hard the younger man was thinking.

“Call me in an hour,” he said, “when you’ve had time to reflect and calm down a little. Then we’ll discuss this again. That’s if you still want in. If you don’t, don’t bother calling at all, and have a nice life.”

He cut the connection and returned indoors.

“All sorted,” he said into the webcam.

“Nothing serious, I hope?” said Tokyo.

“Nothing at all serious, Yukinobu. An employee with an item of information for me. There’s been a minor mishap, it shouldn’t inconvenience us in any way.”

“What kind of mishap?” Boston asked.

“Wax, the Sunless Affairs chap in Parliament, is dead.”

“A politician? No big deal, then.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself, Howard. In a way it’s actually a bonus. He had been quite obstructive, ’til I leaned on him. Now he’s out of the way, that’s a loose end tied up. One less bleeding-heart liberal in the world. One less dandelion in the bowling green in need of uprooting.”

“I prefer to stamp on my dandelions,” said the Bostonian, grinning whitely.

“Weed killer for me,” said the Japanese with a surprisingly girlish titter.

All three men enjoyed a moment in which to dwell on their common ruthlessness and the impunity that their stratospheric wealth afforded them. It was like belonging to the most exclusive club in the world, whose only rule was that you could do exactly as you pleased.

“So anyway, back to business,” said Lambourne. “We have a Solarville deal in place, or as near as makes no difference. The PM’s raiding the public purse to bring all fifteen of them on-stream within in a space of three years. Baseline projection sees us netting between four and five hundred mill.”

“Dollars? Sterling?” said the Bostonian.

“Sterling. Each.”

“Cool.”

“Then, when they’re a proven success, we can start rolling out the system across mainland Europe. I’ve already had expressions of interest from Germany and Italy, and what sounds like an overture of partnership from Russia, though you can never quite tell with those damn oligarchs. Usually when they’re enquiring about a deal, they’re trying to figure out a way of ripping you off and cutting you out.”

“I thought the Russians didn’t have a Sunless problem,” said the Japanese.

“They’re worried they might. There’s been some overspill across the Caucasus and they’d like to be ready in case the trickle turns into a flood. It’s the same in the States, isn’t it, Howard?”

“Hell, yes. There’s not more than about four hundred vampires on our soil, that we know about, and the federal government’s squawking around like Chicken Little, thinking the sky’s falling on our heads. That’s Americans for you—and I speak as a proud patriot. We sure know how to stir ourselves up into a panic. Anything that looks like it’s going to impinge on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gets us frothing at the chops and reaching for the muskets. I could talk the President into buying a hundred Solarvilles right now and nobody’d turn a hair.”